[Python-Dev] a quit that actually quits (original) (raw)

Samuele Pedroni pedronis at strakt.com
Fri Dec 30 12:37:37 CET 2005

Nick Coghlan wrote:

Samuele Pedroni wrote:

Michael Chermside wrote:

The F-bot writes:

in reality, some things are carefully thought out and craftily im- plemented, some things are engineering tradeoffs made at a certain time, and some things are just accidents -- but python-dev will happily defend the current solution with the same energy, no matter what it is. +1 QOTF. Seriously... I've seen this behavior also, but I haven't ever thought about it as clearly as Fredrik does here. When we go to answer questions we ought to pause briefly first and decide which of these categories applies to a given piece of behavior. I think users will be understanding if we're honest about what are the accidents -- every language or software package has some, and just because it's an accident does NOT mean we should "fix" it. Most of the times I've asked questions along these lines I've gotten well-considered answers (usually because something I thought was a deliberate design decision on Guido's part turned out to simply be an accident of the way it happened to be implemented in CPython). it's indeed a matter of trade-offs. Converting NameErrors into commands doesn't look like a good trade off in terms of expectations management and understandable behavior. Ka-Ping Yee ExitHatch still seem a reasonable improvement. Fernando Perez considerations about Python vs. "commands" and prefixing and extra-linguistic extensions seem also on spot. It's not a matter of defending the status quo, more about what kind of price is reasonable for DWIM. I think Fredrik has made an excellent case for promoting the quit & exit interpreter-only builtins to be proper callables.

notice that I wrote that Ka-Ping Yee ExitHatch is an improvement!

Hell, we even have that capability for the callable that displays the license text. . . surely quitting the interpreter is far more important than being able to display the license text, but the support for the latter is significantly better:

Python 2.4.1 (#65, Mar 30 2005, 09:13:57) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. Py> exit 'Use Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit.' Py> quit 'Use Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit.' Py> license Type license() to see the full license text Py> type(license) <class 'site.Printer'> Counting blank lines, 60 lines of site.py are devoted to getting copyright, credit and license to work right, 16 to getting help to work, and only 12 to setting quit and exit to the 'right' strings - and due to modules like readline for Windows and differences in the way interpreters buffer the line input, the exit string for Windows is not always correct. Cheers, Nick.

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